The publishers of Car Busters have proclaimed every September 22 to be WORLD CAR-FREE DAY. Consider taking the bus, riding a bike or walking to work today. Where possible, the World Carfree Network suggests you walk in the middle of the street where the automobile-dependent will get the point. It’s not your fault the MSM hasn’t told everyone we have a chance today to rethink the sustainability of how to get around.
Apropos to how to get people out of their cars, Vancouver scholar Patrick Condon has released a text about Design Strategies for a Post Carbon World, titled Seven Rules for Sustainable Communities, published by the University of British Columbia Press. The table of contents offers talking points enough:
SEVEN RULES FOR SUSTAINABLE, LOW-CARBON COMMUNITIES
1. Restore the Streetcar City
The Streetcar City as a Unifying Principle
Urban Form and the Pattern of Walkin and Riding
Continuous Linear Corridors, Not Stand-alone Nodes
Buses, Streetcars, Light Rail Transit, and Subways
Streetcar as an Urban Investment
Cars, Buses, Streetcar, or Heavy Rail?
Case Study of the Broadway Corridor in Vancouver
What Is the Optimal Transit System?2. Design an Interconnected Street System
Challenges of the Denritic Street System
Four Types of Interconnected Street Systems
Ideal Block and Parcel Size
Road Width, Fire Access, Queuing Streets
The Corner, Lanes and Alleys
Greenhouse Gas and Street Pattern3. Locate Commercial Services, Frequent Transit, and Schools within a Five-minute Walk
Sense of Place in Corridors
Transit, Density, and the Five-minute Walk
Designing for the Bus or Streetcar
The Walk to School4. Locate Good Jobs Close to Affordable Homes
The Historic Relationship between Work and Home
Metropolitan and Community Scale5. Provide a Diversity of Housing Types
The Influence of Building Type on GHG Production
The Sustainable Single-family Home
Build and Adapt Neighborhoods for all Ages and Incomes
Buildings with a Friendly Face to the Street6. Create a Linked System of Natural Areas and Parks
Fredrick Law Olmsted and Linked Natural Areas and Parks
Ian McHarg and the Greenway Revival
Case Study at the Regional Scale:
The Damascus Design Workshop
Case Study at the Neighborhood Scale: Sustainable Fairview
and the Pringle Creek Community, Salem, Oregon7. Invest in Lighter, Greener, Cheaper, Smarter Infrastructure
Watershed Function
Four Rules for Infiltration
Green Infrastructure for Parcels
Impervious Paved Infiltration Streets
I missed that because I was busy writing a snotty piece about the decline of Humanity as chronicled by Walt Disney Studios.
Everybody and his brother, anybody who could afford the drivers test and a gallon of gas, was out on the road today. I’m pretty sure the Indy didn’t publish my letter that suggested the notion that people who constantly have their Citizens Rights to cross, walk along, ride a bicycle or any other way use roads that the Drivers claim as their personal property… might just take up arms, in accordance with the Colorado “make my day law”. And some ignorant redneck throwing a beer bottle at a bicyclist might just get a bullet thrown back his way. I didn’t endorse such actions, and didn’t make any suggestions, like using a modified 12 gauge Flare Pistol for such interpersonal conflict resolutions, but it might have sounded too radical for their tastes. One reason I’d suggest NOT popping the brain-case of the Ignorant and Arrogant Ones is that they’re navigating a large moving object in a place where it would create a safety issue for everybody nearby.
But their sheer Arrogance is creating such a mood and their mistaken notion that bicyclists and pedestrians are merely helpless victims for their Death-dealing Replacement Penises will leave them wide open for a really rude awakening.
If I set my Imagination Antenna to full, I can almost hear the snorts of derision from our Beloved City Hall. “What, those CANADIANS with their successfully designed cities that aren’t bankrupt, not cutting public transit and street lights and schools, how DARE they insolently presume to instruct us… just because we threw our own city down the toilet is no reason for them to believe their system works better than ours”.
Perhaps if somebody could do some ambush journalism on Mayor Rivera and ask him if he’s even studied the models successfully implemented elsewhere. I mean, they keep CLAIMING that they’ve pursued every other option than just giving the city over to Feudal Rule.
I strongly suspect they’re lying. They’ll change the story to “Well, we studied every RESPONSIBLE option”, kind of like George Bush saying first that Every Intelligence Agency had confirmed the million pounds of Nerve Gas, then, when confronted with the truth, said “Well, every RESPONSIBLE Intelligence Analysis…” Trying to get a straight answer out of professional WingNuts is like trying to grab a handful of rain.